A Crisis of Christianity: Why China’s most explosive religious movement worships underground
DEVELOPMENTS
In one of her last actions as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice signed a statement identifying China as one of the worst violators of religious freedom in the world. Yet Christianity appears to be exploding in China, and some say that the atheist state of China may be home to more Christians than any other place in the world. According to estimates by Chinese and foreign scholars, there may be anywhere from seventy to 300 million Chinese Christians—membership eclipsing that of the Communist Party itself.1 Yet, the Chinese government only recognizes 21 million “government-approved” Christians who attend churches operated and controlled by the state’s religious body.
Most of China’s Christian millions belong to house churches, informal gatherings of usually twenty-five or fewer worshippers involving services in a non-public setting, such as a private home. Though the government’s attitude toward these house churches has vacillated between tolerance and outright censorship, there have been reports of persecution and crackdowns intensifying in the days leading up to and following the Olympics. In late 2008, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs released a statement banning religious activities organized by the China Federation of Christian House Churches. This may be the latest harbinger of what may happen to China’s unregistered house churches and raises the question of whether the government will allow the peaceful rise of a largely “underground” and seemingly unstoppable religious movement in China.
BACKGROUND
China is officially an atheist state, but in 2007, the Communist Party amended its Constitution to include a clause recognizing freedom of religion. The Chinese government officially recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism and Taoism. And China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA) regulates and monitors the activities of all registered churches. According to official church rules, congregants must not conduct service mid-week or conduct any proselytizing outside of the church. All churches and religious groups are required to register with SARA and be subject to its constraints and surveillance; any organization that fails to do so is considered illegal and can be shut down at any time.
Many of China’s Christians worship underground in house churches, to avoid government surveillance and possible punishment, including imprisonment. House churches developed an extensive and powerful network across China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Mao Zedong’s ten-year-long political campaign to expel all “liberal bourgeoisie elements” from Chinese society and destroy all things that did not cohere to his set of social values. At the time, China banned all religious activities and sent thousands of church members to labor camps in the countryside. Mao’s Red Guards destroyed most of the churches and places of worship in the country. Faced with extinction, Christians instead went underground, meeting in small groups in forests, houses and other unconventional places where they could worship in secret; such gatherings became known as house churches. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, thousands of house churches had formed across China. Most chose not to come out of hiding at the end of the Cultural Revolution and continued to operate away from the government’s watchful eye.
This brief history of Protestantism in China reveals two surprising facts: that unlike other countries, China’s Christianity is largely homegrown (there were virtually no foreigners in the country from 1950; at the time, roughly 1% of Chinese were Christian). Second, the clandestine nature of house churches is a problem created by the Communist Party itself; house churches grew out of the social pressures produced by the largest religious crackdown in Chinese history. Because of the way they developed, house churches are equipped to adapt. As one church leader points out, house churches don’t need established meeting places; churches that are broken up by police often splinter into new groups that meet in alternate locations. They don’t need finances because they don’t have salaries to pay and can easily access and print Bibles from the Internet. Often, house churches are non-denominational and avoid much of the intra-denominational bickering that more established Christian communities may encounter.
But because house churches are not registered with SARA, they have no legal status. Worshippers are subject to arrest, imprisonment and corporal punishment if they are caught conducting service peacefully, and police will shut down and, in some cases, destroy house churches. However, most churches maintain a tenuous existence that relies mostly on church leaders’ relationships with local officialdom who may choose to turn a blind eye to religious activities if there are social or economic benefits for them. There are numerous reports of church members being arrested and, in some cases, tortured. Reports indicate that Christian in some places are being persecuted and their churches shut down and even destroyed.
Despite these conditions, house churches have never been as numerous, bold or open about their operations as they are today. Christianity is not simply the religion of the oppressed and poor in China. It has spread to the cities, infiltrating the urban intellectual elite and the burgeoning middle class, for whom Christianity has become an important social outlet. As one young Chinese Communist Party Member at Beijing University said, “My schoolfriends and I go to the top school and will have the best jobs in China. But this is not enough. We need something to believe in.” Many Chinese consider Christianity to be the key to a prosperous and modern society, associated with business and science, and many of China’s newest Christian believers are increasingly in the middle class, with access to greatest wealth and business potential.
ANALYSIS
For the Chinese government, one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century has been to maintain the legitimacy of the Communist Party and keep domestic social order while managing China’s economic transition and political rise on the international stage. Some China watchers suggested that China’s social controls would relax once the government had successfully completed its transition and established itself as a global power and pointed to the Olympics as a possible turning point. The opposite appears to have happened. For example, China ousted its foreign missionaries and intensified crackdowns on house churches in preparation for the Olympics—in order to clamp down controls on social order, rather than ease up as many people anticipated. Now that China has successfully re-established itself as a global power, the stakes have gone up, rather than down; before, Beijing now has an international image to maintain and points to its successful rise as justification for its intolerant policies.
The Chinese government may be anxious about the explosive spread of Christianity and particularly because of the clandestine beginnings and pervasive nature of the house church movement. But, the house church movement also represents the same problem of managing large-scale change—in this case, extending religious freedom to Chinese people—while maintaining social order and political legitimacy. The Christian house church movement is too large and well-established for the Chinese government to extinguish; clamping down on them may have the undesired effect of driving them underground and politicizing a movement which has, thus far, been largely peaceful and apolitical. Unlike in the U.S., pro-Christianity and pro-democracy do not necessarily go hand-n-hand, and the government certainly will neither categorize nor treat those two distinct groups in the same way. It is yet unclear how much open religious activity the Chinese government will tolerate, but China’s Christians are too numerous to ignore and a formidable force to reckon with.